“Most people are in favor of progress,” an anonymous wag once noted. “It’s the changes they don’t like.”
That about sums up the sentiment for Web-enabled medical imaging as it looks to conquer healthcare. First it vanquished film, well kind of. Then it made consolidation of image management and information systems a reality. Now it guarantees a bonanza in healthcare for people who don’t get out much: prisoners, military personnel, offshore oil riggers, astronauts. And PACS vendors are stampeding for a lucrative but previously unavailable market, referring physicians, luring them with the promise of image access from anywhere.
Teleimaging isn’t new. But it is suddenly more affordable and being driven to ubiquity because of one technology: the Internet. According to a June report by market analysts Frost and Sullivan, revenues for the U.S. teleradiology and picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) market will exceed $1.1 billion by 2007.
But there’s a downside, too, and it isn’t pretty. “We have little doubt that telemedicine can help to wring costs out of the U.S. healthcare delivery system,” states a report from the Insight Research Corp. of Parsippany, N.J. Insight claims, however, that even though the availability of broadband transmission enables teleradiology to become the growth technology of this decade, momentum has slowed due to regulatory difficulties, reimbursement policies, and technophobia within the medical community.
Please refer to the August 2001 issue for the complete story. For information on article reprints, contact Martin St. Denis
